Five of gaming’s biggest unsolved mysteries

14 July 2017

By Chris Kemp

Is there anything more infuriating than an unsolved mystery? Somehow the most trivial mysteries are worse, because why the hell would someone go to all the effort to set up something so inconsequential if there wasn’t A DAMN POINT TO ANY OF IT AHHHHHHHHH.

In that vein, I’ve compiled a list of some of the most intriguing, creepy or just plain infuriating mysteries that have cropped up in games over the years – none of them solved.

Skyrim’s Bugs-in-Jars Conspiracy

With the amount of time that has been collectively invested into this game, I was amazed to find that there wasn’t a consensus on what the hell this is all about.

Basically, through the course of playing the game and questing and whatnot, you’ll accrue a collection of five jars, each containing a different bug (moth, bee, butterfly, dragonfly, and Torchbug). On the lid of each of these are some magical symbols which seem to imply you can do more than put them all in the same jar for an epic deathmatch (I got fifty bucks on the moth – I like an underdog).

Theories range from word puzzles to summoning giant creatures, but nothing conclusive has been figured out as of yet. Personally, I’m thinking fetish porn.

Mt Chiliad

GTA is fairly well known for its Easter Eggs, which can be found all over their vast worlds. One mystery, however, remains infuriatingly unsolved for fans of GTA V – Mount Chiliad.

Inside the lift station of Mount Chiliad, is a pretty ominous looking mural. It’s quite clearly intended to depict something, with its pyramid arrangement and maze-like inner structure, complete with odd symbols and a general feeling of creepiness.

There’s a small corner of Reddit dedicated to solving the mystery, and as you’d expect everyone has a theory. None of them, however, are particularly agreed on and Rockstar is staying silent.

Alien: Isolation’s Missing Queen

Hey, remember this game? When it came out it got quite a lot of praise as a tense experience that managed to capture the horror of the film franchise. Maybe everyone was just desperate to mind-bleach the memories of Colonial Marines.

As players finished up the game, however, a mystery emerged – where’s the Queen? See the dripping sticky Amy Winehouse zombie that chases you around the ship is actually a drone, but eggs can be spotted in the game that were clearly laid by the Queen, if my course in the Reproductive Cycle of Digital Creatures Based on Non-Existent Movie Creatures can be trusted.

So if the drone didn’t lay the eggs, who did? Maybe it’s THAT THING RIGHT BEHIND YOU

Super Mario Galaxy 2’s Shadowy Figures

If you ever poke around the dark corners of the DeepWeb with your OnionTor4000 Browser and l337 VPN, you’ll find discussions of these mythical beasts.

I think the fascination with this simple bit of the background is that it just really doesn’t fit with the whole Mario thing, and remains totally unexplained. They’re also pretty well hidden – you have to go to a specific world, shift the camera to first person and gaze into the distance, only to see these creepy mother**kers watching your every move as they follow you around the stage.

In a reveal that absolutely did not make anything better, a deep dive into the game’s files reveals that these things are called “hell valley sky trees”, which sounds like the illegitimate spawn of a B horror movie and an infomercial.

That Damn Chest in Banjo Kazooie

The only thing more simultaneously enticing and infinitely frustrating than a locked chest is a box of Krispy Kremes covered in spiders.

Banjo’s treasure chest in the Mad Monster Mansion has frustrated gamers for years, as all signs point to the fact that you can and should open it for some kind of epic reward. But in spite of thousands of hours of combined effort, nobody’s managed it yet.

The problem with crap like this is every now and then something shows up in the news about an Easter Egg that was discovered after ten or twenty years, which just makes it all the more likely that somehow, some way, there’s a way to pry this damn thing open.

Things to watch

Important stuff

Contact us

If you'd like to speak to someone about placing an advertisement on this website, email sales@nag.co.za.
Any concerns, complaints, compliments, bug-reports, or general word-speaking with regards to the website can be sent to webmaster@nag.co.za.